Factions can control territory, build towns and wage war against rival factions.

Rules can be established to control how your faction is governed, how it interacts
with other individuals and other factions, and more importantly how it handles
infractions on its sovereignty.

Factions (and even powerful and well developed individual players) can hire NPCs
to perform duties around their towns and frontiers. Manning a guard post, farming
a field, providing vendor services for your goods, patroling a busy corridor and more
can all be handled by NPCs. This will allow the players to log off of the game and know
their town will not fall apart without them immediately. They will require upkeep
in the form of pay and/or food from your fields.

Borrowing concepts from RTS games and possibly even City-building games, buildings and machinery can be erected to serve purposes (silos for food storage, walls for defense, forges to melt the hardest metals, mills to process the strongest of woods, machines to make mass quantities of the most mundane parts).

Towns with the best infrastructure and resources will be the lifeblood and work-horses of well-off factions.
However, players must also struggle to keep their buildings from deteriorating or being destroyed. Unlike other games where a player's investment is protected indefinitely.

Factions is an unforgiving world. Build your house in a vulnerable location or fail to provide maintenance on it and you risk losing your investment.